I do think the fediverse is better than the corporate built alternatives but the more time I’ve spent here the less I believe that it is a great solution. People are the fundamental problem and people control every instance, moderate every community, and post every comment (excluding bots which are their own problem). The amount of infighting I’ve witnessed here over trivial bullshit is astounding. People are constantly calling for defederation over one offense or another. Much of it rivals Reddit in it’s pettiness.
It’s true that no single entity controls it all, and that is an improvement, but everything still gets fragmented so much that I don’t think I believe it can reasonably grow beyond what it is now. Not without running into variations of the same problems as the others at least.
I think the simple truth of the matter is that humans can’t help this kind of tribal behavior. We group ourselves together using all kinds of labels, some broad and some incredibly specific, but the end result is always the same. Those with the labels I gave myself which are most important to me are my friends and those without them are my enemy. Until that primal need to exclude others is gone, any communal space we create will devolve to the point that there are effectively multiple siloed echo chambers that rarely overlap.
That was more of a rant than I initially intended, but the point is that I don’t think the fediverse would have solved this problem. If a federated version of Instagram was the dominant service for that kind of activity then the No Kings account there would have been censored by many groups for many reasons. Enough so that I don’t know that the impact would be any different.
At the server level we already have that - federating with a server includes that server in the web of trust.
At the user level, how would new users become trusted? That seems unachievable given how difficult it is to attract users just in general without something like that. I’ve been on the fediverse for years but I don’t know any other users that would “trust” me.
Nah, bots can farm reputation better than humans can.
The problem is that federation assumes good intent of the admins of other instances. If someone builds a network of instances intended to manipulate votes et cetera, I can’t see how the fediverse could resist that.
Instance A can’t trust that votes from instance B are legit. As soon as there’s no trust then federating even with an aparently trustworthy instance becomes too costly in terms of time and effort.
I do think the fediverse is better than the corporate built alternatives but the more time I’ve spent here the less I believe that it is a great solution. People are the fundamental problem and people control every instance, moderate every community, and post every comment (excluding bots which are their own problem). The amount of infighting I’ve witnessed here over trivial bullshit is astounding. People are constantly calling for defederation over one offense or another. Much of it rivals Reddit in it’s pettiness.
It’s true that no single entity controls it all, and that is an improvement, but everything still gets fragmented so much that I don’t think I believe it can reasonably grow beyond what it is now. Not without running into variations of the same problems as the others at least.
I think the simple truth of the matter is that humans can’t help this kind of tribal behavior. We group ourselves together using all kinds of labels, some broad and some incredibly specific, but the end result is always the same. Those with the labels I gave myself which are most important to me are my friends and those without them are my enemy. Until that primal need to exclude others is gone, any communal space we create will devolve to the point that there are effectively multiple siloed echo chambers that rarely overlap.
That was more of a rant than I initially intended, but the point is that I don’t think the fediverse would have solved this problem. If a federated version of Instagram was the dominant service for that kind of activity then the No Kings account there would have been censored by many groups for many reasons. Enough so that I don’t know that the impact would be any different.
I think what you’re saying is that fediverse is a better solution but it will not scale and I agree.
Pretty much, yeah. Marginally better at least, depending on what you want it to be.
I dont think the fediverse will be able to withstand a sophisticated threat in its current form.
Once the number of MAUs makes it worth manipulating, it will be impossible to manage.
There will be a few large well managed instances with no federation, and a disparate assortment of tiny instances with very limited federation.
I think a some kind of Web of Trust would have to be implemented. Like with GPG decide which servers and users you trust.
I don’t know how that could work.
At the server level we already have that - federating with a server includes that server in the web of trust.
At the user level, how would new users become trusted? That seems unachievable given how difficult it is to attract users just in general without something like that. I’ve been on the fediverse for years but I don’t know any other users that would “trust” me.
Agreed. The only reason this is not overrun with spam and bots is because it is small.
A possible solution could be reputation, but that gets dangerously close to Reddit Karma.
Nah, bots can farm reputation better than humans can.
The problem is that federation assumes good intent of the admins of other instances. If someone builds a network of instances intended to manipulate votes et cetera, I can’t see how the fediverse could resist that.
Instance A can’t trust that votes from instance B are legit. As soon as there’s no trust then federating even with an aparently trustworthy instance becomes too costly in terms of time and effort.